Dear Andy and everybody-
I think Marx' notion of understanding through making history and Vygotsky's
notion of "formative experiment" or newly developed notion of "action
research" are handy here. I do not think that we can understand how to
bridge a boundary between politically different communities (and whether it
is possible to do) and what constitutes the boundary without trying to do
that.
What do you think?
Eugene
_____
From: Andy Blunden [mailto:ablunden@mira.net]
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 9:37 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: Multidisciplinary perspectives
At 01:45 PM 30/11/2003 -0500, Eugene wrote:
The practical question for me is what constitutes a boundary between your
and their communities and how to bridge this boundary&.
What do you think?
Exactly! This is surely one of the great questions of our times. One of the
elements of the answer is that the bridge cannot be through theory or what I
call "sacred history". As vital as they are to the life of each one of us,
these constitute the barriers not the bridges. So contrariwise I think the
answer lies in the broad terrain of ethical politics. There are a number of
candidates for bridge-building here. (i) Values: personally I think values
are of limited though non-trivial use. They constitute the currency of
exchange but not the activity or movement itself. (ii) Rules and maxims of
collaboration, I think are important, like "Mind your own business", and
"What we do must be decided by us (not by you or me alone!)", (iii) Meaning,
which is the one raised by the discussion on Peirce, this is where the
meaning of your own life intersects with the meaning of your actions to
others. When Bush spends "Thankgiving" in his flak-jacket in Iraq, that has
a very clear meaning.
Andy
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